Monday, February 04, 2013

Lessons for ‘learning’ from Amazon’s Napsterisation of bookstores, books and every other damn thing

Jeff Bezos was named the top
global CEO by Forbes. Why? Because he had the vision to not only to
disintermediate expensive book distribution, he then went on to kindle the
market for online books, disintermediating paper books. Not content with this
he is well underway in disintermediating every other thing in retail. He’s even
had a successful pop at virtualising digital storage. What lessons can we learn
in education from an Amazon-like onslaught?

Bezos
born to sell books

Bezos speaks of the self-reliance
on the ranch of his childhood and the self-directed education at his Montessori
elementary school (like Page and Brin of Google). Like Page and Brin, he was a
talented programmer but more than that he was an entrepreneur with a
single-minded vision: Bezos was born to sell books. He took a course on
bookselling just ten months prior to setting up Amazon. What he learnt was that
in the book business, customer service was the magic dust. But customer service
wasn’t just about people, it’s also about brand, reliability, finding what you
want quickly, ordering quickly, price, ease of use, personalisation and email
communication. Busy people want to browse but they also want transactions that
are simple, fast and intuitive.

Bezos loves books but what he
saw was that the book is the text, not the binding and cover, those were added
by the publisher. “You can’t ever outbook
the book” he says, “so you have to
give added value such as font size, lightness, dictionary look ups, quick
downloads…” But he quite literally sees himself as having ended the “five hundred year run” of the printed
book and its associated, expensive distribution. How? By creating the biggest
bookstore on earth with its famous ‘One click Brand’, where you can ‘Buy now
with one click’.

Personalised
learning

Amazon’s contribution to the
dissemination of knowledge is considerable. Learning in many contexts, formal
and informal, is arguably still driven by books. They still fuel learning in
schools, colleges and universities and are a mainstay in the diet of many
learners. Books still matter and never before have we had convenient access to
so many.

Lot’s is made of
‘personalised learning’ but Amazon gives its substance. Beyond the simple
buying (or selling) of books lies the cleverness of the recommendation engine.
You have access to customer reviews as well as lists of recommended books under
specific topics AND personal recommendations tailored to your interests, based
on data gathered from past past purchases. Some argue that this leads to an
expansion of reading and interests as the buyer is given breadth and depth of
information about the books available that lead to more books being bought. Amazon
already provides previews in the form of a few pages before you buy. Search
Inside the Book has been extended through experiments designed to change our
relationship with the printed text. This also aids learning, as it prevents
unnecessary purchases.

The first lesson we can learn
from Amazon in the learning game is that background recommendation software,
‘adaptive’ learning, will come to bear on teaching online. T the moment most
onine learning is fairly flat and linear, even the much heralded MOOCs.
However, the real productivity increases come through personalised learning
delivered through smart software.

Long
tail and learning

Chris Anderson rightly points
to Amazon as the prime example of how technology plays to ‘long tail’ selling.
In a typical bookshop, stock will be limited and often controlled by behind the
scene deals with publishers. On Amazon, you can find almost anything, no matter
how obscure. The long tail has also been extended by allowing small book
sellers to sell their goods through Amazon. This is clearly a boon to learning,
as it provides depth and breadth of access to learners, students and academics,
who were often limited by the contents of their local or institutional library.

The long tail in learning is
a problem, as small volume courses, especially in Higher Education, are
expensive to run. The way to get volume is to cluster leareners around the
course, rather than the institution. This has already happened in online
Universities such as the Open University in the UK but also with MOOCs.

Napsterisation
of bookstores

Online access to books, has
given us the ability to search, browse and buy a larger range of books than was
ever possible through traditional bookshops, often at cheaper prices.
Strangely, far from reducing the number of books bought, it seemed to nourish
the market. Book clubs have never been more popular. However, it is now clear
that some large bookshop chains have been crippled, if not murdered by Amazon.
Like music stores and video rental stores, they have been disintermediated. On
the other hand it has never been easier for those whom live in towns without
bookstores, rural areas or countries with poor retail opportunities, to buy
from the biggest bookstore in the world. You used to have to buy books
somewhere, now you can buy them anywhere.

Bricks and mortar educational
institutions are being Napsterised. This happened in corporate training ay back
in the 80s when the large training centres were sold off. Online learning
renders much of the expensive to run real-estate obsolete (in education thay
have obscenely low occupancy rates anyway).

Napsterisation
of books

Not content with destroying
physical bookstores, he is well on his way to diminishing the role of the
physical, paper book. Various versions of the Kindle have created a huge
audience for online books and, with the Kindle Fire, put Amazon on the tablet
map. Online books are here to stay. The book, after all is the text, not the
binding and cover art, which are added by the publisher, not the author.
Self-publishing has also been made easier. For some this has reduced the need
to purchase lots of heavy textbooks, for others the Kindle has meant more books
read on planes, trains and beaches.

Content is a rather nebulous
concept in education as a school or University doesn’t own much. The research
is largely in Journals owned by publishers or open source, as are textbooks,
and academics rarely have much in the way of defined content beyond their
expertise. MOOCs and content rich alternatives are already challenging the old
model.

Napsterisation
of retail

Amazon.com’s mission: To be the Earth’s most customer-centric
company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online,
is well on its way. Retail space has been in decline since 2009 and Amazon has
been partly responsible. Bookstores were the first victims, then electronics
stores such as Comet in the UK and Circuit City in the US. We all have
nostalgic thoughts about small retailers but for those who prefer low prices
and never much liked physical ‘shopping’ Amazon’s a saviour.

It is always assumed that online
learning will have limited impact on a limited number of subjects but that’s
what they said in retail. Turns out that is can be applied to almot any retail
task – similarly, I suspect, with learning

Napsterisationof
IT

And don’t forget Amazon’s low
cost cloud services. This is already a boon to educational institutions who
want to lower their storage costs. You can shift your data online, first for
business continuity, then operationally, scaling only on demand using a pay as
you go model.

Conclusion

Who hasn’t used Amazon?
Precious few. Most of us love tearing open that cardboard box and seeing our
books appear, and increasingly other goodies. In terms of learning, its
increased access, lower prices and ease of use has meant more, not less
learning, despite the onslaught on physical bookstores. He has changed our
whole way of seeing, buying, reading and even publishing books, making many
more books available to many more people.

But the big lesson for
learning is - don’t build more bricks ‘n mortar solutions with expensive
overheads, look at ways of making bricks and mortar redundant. It doesn’t
matter how much you try to defend the old model, this overhead will cripple
you. Learning must be made more responsive to need – faster, cheaper, easier to
access, responsive to user data, and ONLINE. The ‘Amazons’ of learning are
already here, many more are coming.

2 Comments:

Matt said...

And the closing paragraph seems to totally contradict what's happening in London's east end where Stratford may become the academic outpost for institutions previously bounded to the restrictions that bricks and mortar (especially in central london) impose. Essentially; very expensive.

So universities, even right now, are thinking about building more. Estates are planning to spend hundreds of millions on these estates. How much is being spent in virtual estate? Expansion of online or distance learning? one million? probably not. Staff time to develop new courses in innovative ways? Ha ha ha, Nope.

Something's got to break, otherwise the quiet and huge organisations (Hello Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco etc) are plotting; they must know that this entire model can flip around in their favour. First to innovate wins & I suspect a race began with the popularisation of MOOCs last year.

Couldn't agree more. There's an obsession with capital budgets and monument building. We know that most University buildings have disastrously low occupancy rates - they're empty most of the time - so why build more? Sleepwalking into the future...